Product Lifecycle

With our experience in the mobile space, we see a lot of ideas floating in the market. Everyone has ideas for custom mobile apps, some of them are really innovative and potentially could be the next killer app if executed well.

To execute a mobile app idea well, we have put together some basic strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Getting started

Building a custom mobile application is a lot like a flight from JFK to SFO. Building mobile applications can get complicated quickly if features are not prioritized according to business end goals. In the mobile industry, specially today more than yesterday, technologies change rapidly.

Having the right strategy from the beginning is important, taking a wrong strategic step could steer your flight in the wrong direction, not that it can’t be steered in the right direction again but not without spending more time and money.

Nyaaya is a non-profit venture with a mission statement to demystify indian laws. Their team approached us with a crystal clear problem statement during a hackathon. They wanted to make Indian law more understandable and accessible to the common man.

We set out to design and develop a mobile application as a solution to their problem. Mobile devices have truly become a commodity today and almost every person has access to it.

Here is how we approached the user experience and development of the app.

So you have an app in the app store and are struggling with app installs, user signups, app engagement, active user counts and conversions? Have you put yourself in the shoes of an actual user that fits the target audience and used the app? You will be surprised to realise how you can have a completely different perspective in many situations.

It’s natural for someone who is close to the product to not notice obvious work-flow issues in your app. Perhaps your app just needs a better Onboarding? Let’s do an app audit to identify key areas of improvements in your application.

What is an App Audit?

App audit is a (timed) activity during which experts (in product strategy, design and development) do a thorough analysis of your app. This analysis is then used to make educated guesses (based on facts, research and data) and recommendations to optimize or tweak your app experience. This would help you identify positives and negatives of your app for a potential end-user.

Orai app team got in touch with us to develop app experience for their speech training artificial intelligence module. They were pursuing an interesting idea to solve a basic problem that many people have viz. fear of public speaking. Stripped down to the core, they wanted to build an app that would serve as a personal speech coach which would give positive reinforcement and real time personalized feedback as you practice your speech.

Mobile applications have become the first point of entry for a lot of new and old consumer services and products. Many popular technology, operations and finance companies have their mobile apps in the app store and are constantly innovating and redefining the way in which their business operates. What does this mean to the end user? Well, the end users’ life becomes easier as these services become more accessible and economical due to innovative ways of doing business. Few of the top players are going all-in on their mobile apps, with ‘mobile first’ or even ‘mobile only’ strategy for introducing and shaping their consumer offerings.

iPhone: when storage runs out while installing app

It is important to remember that the consumers’ mobile device may have limited memory capability (due to various reasons) and data / WiFi plans are still precious. Mobile app updates unlike website updates are more intrusive, they cost data and memory to the user. On an average an application would be atleast 5 to 7 MB (probably even more) in size, when the user downloads it from the store. Also, unlike other files, the complete application needs to be downloaded again for every app upgrade. (In the future, Google and Apple may introduce incremental upgrades where only new app functionality can be downloaded as an upgrade)

Many interested users have easy access to WiFi and have auto-updates turned on, but majority of them don’t. With this in mind, it becomes important to answer how often should these businesses release an app update — should it be every week, fortnightly, monthly or more.